Noughties (6 page)

“Oh yeah?” I was anxious but alert, trying to keep up.

“Yah. It’s about the pleasure of the chase. Bloody good poem.”

“I see.”
Pleasure of the chase, pleasure of the chase
. I fumbled after the words, desperate to possess them.

“Here w’are,” he said, showing me into a tiny birdcage of a room, all the space hogged by a creaky oak table. “Good luck, Eel-iot.” He slapped the wind-beaten poem down and shut me in. There was a girl opposite, already under way, reading a passage for a Law interview. Her sheet was carefully colonized by different-colored highlighter pens and fastidious notes. She had tears sliding down her puffy cheeks. Fucking depressing.

It took about fifteen minutes before the words of the poem began to register. I repeatedly passed my eyes over it but nothing went in … no discernible subject or images stuck. I wasn’t reading so much as looking. It might as well have been written in a different language.

Pleasure of the chase … Come on, Eliot … it’s all about the pleasure of the chase … 
What
chase? The chase of
what
? Christ.

It’s a sonnet … I think … one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen. Jackpot! Sonnet. Great. Love poem then, right? So why is he talking about deer and hunting and shit? Kinky?

Oh yeah? Even if you do say so yourself …

Unlucky.

Midlife crisis? Maybe you should think about getting a nifty little sports car or a nice young bird on the side …

Crikey, I know that feeling, mate. Brandy Knox, Year 12. Jesus, she was fit. She had legs like a giraffe and wore tight black trousers (great bum) with that scandalous thong-a-thong-thong-thong peering cheekily over the top. She oozed sex, but I couldn’t get near her. Only interested in older boys with shite cars and six-quid-an-hour jobs. I really feel this guy’s pain.

Well, there’s no need to be a tosser about it. I’d have your back, be your wingman and that.

A little footnote at the bottom told me that the Latin jazz means “do not touch me,” which is a bit rude if you ask me.
I do feel bad for him, but I feel worse for the girl/deer/whatever-the-fuck. Her boyfriend sounds like a right prick: overbearing, jealous, paranoid. In fact, almost exactly like me. Regrettable really, but okay as long as you don’t impinge like this Caesar chap. Come on though, the poet would behave the same way if he had half the chance—he’s already said he wants to ruin
my
chances. But is it all worth it? I guess. This girl he’s after does seem a bit of a lust-pot—“wild for to hold.” Oh yeah? Well, aren’t you quite the little—

“Time’s up.” Spade face stuck his mug round the door and motioned me to follow.

He marched me up a high staircase to a chair outside a door. A chair outside a door on a high staircase.

“Just wait harr until you are called for.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

I was to be interviewed by the college’s two English tutors, Dr. Dylan Fletcher (Senior Fellow) and Dr. Polly Snow (Research Fellow). I had looked them both up on the English faculty and college websites: Dr. Fletcher had written some groundbreaking study about eighteenth-century poets that I’d never heard of (
The Eighteenth-Century Poets
); a revolutionary monograph on representations of fruit in Milton and Marvell, explored—of course—through the lens of sociocultural Marxism (
The Ambiguous Apple: Towards a Poetics of Fruit in the Writings of Milton and Marvell
); a life-changing, radical postmodern account of early modern prose narratives (
The Unfortunate Signifier: Derrida and Elizabethan Fiction
); and
the
definitive account of Wordsworth’s something or other (
Wordsworth: Poet
). Dr. Snow was younger and less experienced, having only recently completed her doctorate at Cambridge, and was in her second year of teaching as a Research Fellow at Hollywell. I assumed that they were both inside Dr. Fletcher’s
room, devising death traps and finalizing underhand tactics: carefully positioning my chair so I’d be blinded by the sun; raising their own so that they could look down on me from a height. The pleasure of the chase and Brandy Knox’s arse were the recurring themes of my famished brain, every second a minute in the silence of that chill stairwell.

Just as I began to wonder if they had forgotten about me (all day long I had been haunted by a strange feeling that I didn’t exist … perhaps they had already chosen the students they wanted … or maybe they were just watching me fidget and sweat on CCTV), I heard footsteps reverberating from below, winding around corners, growing progressively louder, hunting me down. I sat up rigid. Tense and formal. A girl appeared, decked out in a blue dress that ended just above the knee, a multicolored pastel scarf studded with sequins, and a pair of heels that boldly solidified her calves. Her hair was astonishingly straight (a light brown flirting with blonde) and her face came close to conventionally desirable, though some unidentifiable feature just offset it from being so (was it the nose? the chin? the mouth?… impossible to tell). She carried a skinny latte and a black Americano. A reassuring smile peeled from ear to ear.

Phew, just some postgrad, I thought. Ignoring her I slouched back down in the chair, reacquainting my mind with Knox’s toosh and giving my nose an experimental poke. I lodged the greased-up digit into my gob for some interview sustenance. The girl had stopped and was watching me.

“Hiya,” she beamed. “Sorry—desperate need for a caffeine boost! Just let us settle back down and we’ll call you in a minute.”

A noise that I can only describe as a thirteen-year-old’s voice breaking in slow motion shoulder-barged its way from my throat; a stuck sound clogged with alarm and farce: “O~k~a~y.” These two syllables wobbled and clanged like a hand-chime. She disappeared into Dr. Fletcher’s room and I could hear much giggling and bustling about.

Fuckety fuckety fuck, I squirmed to myself. What a dick. Supreme start, Eliot, supreme start, mate.

With little time to compose myself, I was asked to enter.

“Sorry about the wait,” said Dr. Snow, sincerely but lighthearted, as she tiptoed amongst the piles of books that were flung about the floor like land mines, back toward her armchair. “It’s been a long day.”

The room was a dream come true, lined wall to wall with ceiling-high bookshelves. Auden, Wilde, Hardy, Eliot, Atwood, Dickens, Austen, Pinter, Yeats, Heaney: the names leapt at me in a flurry of ecstasy, all brandishing intimidating promise. In the center was a low coffee table, surrounded by a sofa on one side and matching armchairs on the other. The table swayed in haphazard splendor with stacks of red-scrawled essays and books, some lying open and bent, others teetering suicidally over the edge. A fridge whinnied in the corner, decorated with postcards and photographs: William Burroughs disdainfully pursing his lips, smart and plain like some demented bank manager; Wilde posing as aesthetic poster-boy on American lecture tour; George Bernard Shaw scowling like a reformist Santa Claus; Salvador Dali balancing a novelty-pencil mustache on his top lip; the startling cheekbones of Virginia Woolf. Modernist prints, all of which I was embarrassingly ignorant of, were dotted about the few patches of available wall space and a perplexing charcoal sketch of a naked female torso and genitalia hung above Dr. Fletcher’s chair. It felt like
something was being revealed to me … something I could never have known. Piercing winter sunlight illuminated the room and set me slightly at ease.

Dr. Fletcher was sprawled on his crimson throne, watching me intently as I maneuvered my way through his scholarly maze. He was a short man on the younger side of middle age and his fashion sense reflected a longing to be hip: his thick black hair was molded into a chunky quiff (possibly a throwback to a Morrissey obsession from his own student days), and he wore a fitted gray blazer over a white V-neck T-shirt (Topman), blue jeans, and some classic Converse sneakers. Despite his attempts at retaining a youthful cool, the flecks of silver peppered through his barnet instantly gave him away. I had convinced myself that I would be slightly starstruck by Dr. Fletcher, though I wasn’t quite sure why. He is the type of academic who fancies himself a darling of the media (he calls himself a “public intellectual”): dabbles in radio, obliging the BBC whenever they come looking for an “authority” on any random matter (he was on Radio 4 last month ad-libbing about metaphors of money in a debate about the economy), and has appeared once or twice on
Newsnight Review
as that vaguely good-looking one from academia (though he despises the label “academic,” settling instead for “writer” or “creator of ideas”). And, of course, he pens the occasional book review for several literary supplements. He is the Hendrix of the scholarly world and I was desperate to be tutored by him.

“Take a seat.”

“Thanks,” I said, dropping onto the sofa.

Shitting arseholes: I had forgotten to shake their hands. Oh dear god, no. I might as well get up and leave now. It’s all over. (My well-meaning but foolish deputy head teacher,
in all her ignorance about Oxbridge applications, had made me practice the art of handshaking in her office the week before: “Now this is vital, Eliot,” Miss Hill had said. “Absolutely vital. Look them directly in the eye and say, ‘Pleased to meet you’ … And don’t forget to read the newspapers. Current affairs, Eliot.
Current affairs
.”)

Dr. Fletcher filled his chair confidently though his frame was negligible, one hand massaging the back of his head, the other his crotch, every now and again venturing upward to wipe across his nose. The eccentric choreography was oddly reassuring.

“Good to see you. Welcome to Oxford University and Hollywell College? I’m Dylan Fletcher and this is Polly,” he said in a private-school voice that had been self-consciously toned down, spiced with fashionable glottal stops and rising intonations that he’d picked up from his students.

“Hi, I’m Eliot.”

“How’s your day been so far? Have they been looking after you?” quizzed Dr. Snow. Great: small talk. This I could handle.

“Yeah, it’s been good. Everyone seems really friendly.” Who? The pansy existentialist? Spade face? I’m so full of shit.

Dr. Snow rested a pad of lined paper on top of her carefully crossed legs.

“Right then, feel free to dive in and tell us about the poem,” said Dr. Fletcher, sipping from his takeaway coffee. I was fixed in his authoritative stare while Dr. Snow sat waiting, ready to scribble notes on me. Silence.

“Urmmm, well, it’s a poem, I feel” (oh Christ) “about the pleasure of the chase.”

Dr. Fletcher continued to stare unflinchingly, Dr. Snow already penning entire paragraphs and chapters.

“The voice is racked with doubt, almost as if he is like deluding himself, sort of thing. Urrrr, there are moments of kind of clarity where he can like face up to his shortcomings, but these are like quickly urr overrun by outbursts of temptation and stuff.”

A stare, a grin, and silence.

“And the form like encapsulates this” (What the fuck is she writing down? “Grade A pillock” or “state school simpleton?” … Or maybe she’s stealing my ideas …) “in the way that like it’s like a sonnet.”

My sweat expanded and rarefied into the perspiration of terror.

“Coz like it doesn’t break down into neat quatrains … it’s as though the form can’t like contain his psychological and urrr” (say it, say it) “sexual turmoil?” (Oh god, I’m blushing. Now they’ve got me down as a prize pervert.) “You know, it like bleeds over the boundaries and runs back and forth, kind of thing.” Woooooooooooooo, take some air.

“But isn’t he just some toff talking about hunting?” asked Dr. Fletcher. Dr. Snow rolled her eyes, somehow managing to keep her smile aloft.

“Errrrrrrrrrrrrrr?”

“I’m just playing devil’s advocate,” he said with a smirk. “No, I think you’re right. Absolutely.”

“Of course, the hunt is like a
metaphor
for the pursuit of love,” I continued, stressing my flashy use of a poetic device, “and like the deer is a sort of symbol for the evasive, perhaps even teasing female. A bit sexist really” (a supportive nod from Dr. Snow) “but then again the poet is totally alive to male hypocrisy—the other man’s ownership of the woman is clearly shown as a negative, I guess, yet at the same time the speaker has like possessive, predatory urges himself.”

This seemed to go down well, in that no one was cringing, vomiting, or rolling about on the floor. Dr. Snow continued to jot notes, passing sentence, while Dr. Fletcher placed his coffee cup by the side of his chair.

“So did you like the poem?”

“Am I allowed to?”

“Of course, why not?”

I thought long and hard.

“I think I will do if I get in.”

They both chuckled.

“Let’s move on. What would you like to talk about?” asked Dr. Fletcher.

Let’s see: basketball—English bands beginning with “The”—golden-era hip-hop—Martin Scorsese movies—Brandy Knox’s body—my chances of being accepted—you …

“Well, I really like the Beat Generation, like Kerouac and Ginsberg—”

“Haven’t read them for years,” said Dr. Fletcher, possibly lying. Dr. Snow continued to scribble. “Anything else?”

And so we talked about some of my A-level set texts—
Doctor Faustus, Gulliver’s Travels, The World’s Wife
—Dr. Snow throwing in counter-arguments to test me, and Dr. Fletcher revealing a tendency to disappear into soliloquy: “Gulliver’s like a little penis. Being inside the girl’s pocket is about wanting to be inside of a young girl, naturally?” I was quite taken with his dark humor and willingness to say anything at all. There was a sense of freedom that was infectious and invigorating: